Backup and Disaster Recovery of SAP HANA workloads on Azure with Actifio

In this post, we will look at SAP HANA workload hosted on Azure and Actifio Copy Data Platform can work together to backup, restore and bring up SAP HANA databases from Azure Blob object storage in minutes. We propose reference architectures that leverage Actifio’ s integrations with Microsoft Azure Blob object storage and Elastic Block Storage offerings to deliver cost-optimized or performance-optimized DR.

 

Enterprises run SAP HANA for their mission-critical applications. Azure Compute is a class-leading IaaS platform to run enterprise workloads. Click here for more details.

 

SAP applications are susceptible to data corruption, accidental deletion, or even security threats such as ransomware attacks. Therefore, every SAP HANA installation needs to be supported by a enterprise backup and disaster recovery solution.

 

Actifio and SAP HANA

 

Actifio Virtual Data Pipeline technology enables businesses to protect, access, and move their data faster, more efficiently, and more by merely decoupling data from the underlying storage.

 

The traditional way of backing up SAP HANA is using the Backint API. The Backint API sends backups to either a local storage cache on production (data is copied onto the backup server) or to an NFS mount point. Optionally, this data may further be copied into additional storage mediums in a deduplicated (dedup) format. Actifio is an SAP backint certified solution. Refer SAP Note 2031547.

 

An alternative to the Backint API approach is to use a solution that invokes the same savepoint API that SAP HANA uses internally to flush data with consistency from memory to disk. Once the data is flushed to disk, to ensure that no new writes happen to the disk, take a snapshot of the underlying disk. Then, in conjunction with a bitmap connector that keeps track of changed blocks, the solution can transfer only the changed blocks from production to the backup server. Since the data is captured in application-consistent native format, recoveries and cloning data for testing/dev become much more comfortable with this approach. Actifio uses this savepoint API approach to capture SAP HANA data in an efficient, incremental forever manner, which is used for backup, recovery, migration, and cloning.

 

Customer benefits are:

 

1. Reduced performance impact: Incremental forever backups reduce the I/Os and network impact on the production environment.
2. Short DB cloning times for test/dev: Instant DB cloning is possible because the captured data is mounted as virtual full copies, enabling users to self-service provision multiple copies of multi-TB SAP HANA databases simultaneously.
3. Migration to Azure: Migrating a multi-tier app like SAP S4/HANA involves migrating the database and all the other components of applications running in VMs and physical servers to Azure. Actifio has the unique capability to capture DB, VMs, physical servers, file system running on-premises or any public cloud and migrate to Azure. 
4. Instant Access to backup: The data is captured in native application-consistent format, they can recover in minutes by mounting virtual full copies of the SAP HANA database. 

Reference Architectures

 

A complete Actifio deployment, as depicted in the above diagram (Fig. 2), involves the provisioning of the following components.

 

 

• Actifio Global Manager (AGM): Actifio Global Manager provides a single pane of glass to manage all Actifio Sky appliances. AGM provides a central place to create and manage enterprise-wide Service Level Agreement (SLA) templates, configure, monitor, and troubleshoot Actifio copy data infrastructure. Additionally, AGM supports a rich security model that enables fine-grain control over resource organization and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). 
• Actifio Sky: Actifio Sky enables you to capture data from production systems, manage it in the most efficient way possible, and use virtual copies of the data for business requirements like Backup, Test and Dev, Analytics, and AI.
• Actifio Connector: Actifio Connector, a small-footprint, lightweight service running on SAP HANA instances. The connector discovers application context and integrates with any application-specific APIs to provide a consistent application backup. Actifio connectors are OS-specific and not application-specific.

 

 

These components come together to deliver end-to-end backup and recovery functionality. In the reference architecture above, the Actifio connector resides on the SAP HANA instance and other application server instances.

 

We recommend below reference architecture for protection against corruption, data loss, and human/programmatic errors. In this reference architecture, we recommended deploying Actifio Sky appliance in the same region and the same virtual network as the SAP Production landscape. Backup repositories can be configured on Azure Managed disk and/or Azure blob storage. In a typical deployment, the most recent points in time (PIT) are stored in the Azure managed disk due to the network proximity and high-performance media. Older PITs are tiered to Azure blob enabling long-term retention. For additional resiliency, Actifio recommends configuring Azure blob target in a different region.

 

 

The key Actifio feature is Instant Access capability. Backup data from Azure Managed Disk OR Azure Blob can be shared in just a few seconds for immediate access. Combining the instant access capability with application-aware recovery workflows enables the database admin to spin up fully functional, virtual copies of the HANA database from backup in a matter of minutes.

 

Reference Architecture for Disaster Recovery

 

We recommend the below reference architecture to protect SAP HANA applications running in Azure from disaster. The reference architecture provided below delivers protection from region-wide physical and logical failures.

 

 

The critical elements of this reference architecture are

1. SAP HANA database and other Azure instances and file systems forming the SAP landscape are all protected by the Actifio appliance in the primary region.
2. A second Actifio appliance installed in the second region.
3. Actifio solution is configured with one or more data replication policies.
1. OnVault: By setting up an OnVault Pool (which utilizes Azure Blob as a backup repository), data can be periodically copied to an Azure Blob bucket in another region
2. StreamSnap: StreamSnap replication allows copying data from an Actifio appliance in one region to another into a storage pool consisting of Azure Managed disk. 

Testing results

 

Target Restore VM details: M128s (128 vCPU, 2048 GB RAM) HANA 2 SPS 04

Data size: 1.3 TB Source database

Actifio configuration:

Actifio GM: Standard D4s v3 (4 vCPU, 16 GiB memory)

Actifio Sky: Standard D8s v3 (8 VCPU, 32 GiB memory)

Database Mount (backup image) timings: 10 mins 40 secs to mount 1.3 TB of data.

 

Database mount timing includes time to start up HANA in the target VM. Once the database is mounted, all the data is accessible. Before unmounting the backup image, we need to copy the data to the target database volume and it can happen in background as the system is functional.

 

 

Summary

 

Actifio’s incremental forever, application-consistent, native format capture capabilities provide low RPO, low RTO, and shorter cloning time for SAP HANA. LVM (Logical Volume Manager) disk configuration is a pre-requisite to leverage Actifio VDP. Actifio BackInt backup solution can be used for non LVM based storage options such as Azure Netapp Files (ANF) or when mdadm is used.

This blog focusses on Actifio VDP for SAP HANA. We are working on a whitepaper that will encompass Actifio data protection for other databases (AnyDB).

 

Authored by :

Siddhartha Rabindran, Principal SAP Technical Specialist, Microsoft

Anbu Govindasamy, Principal SAP Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft

Raj Hosamani, Senior Product Manager, Actifio

Srikanth Shetkar, Actifio GO Ops Lead